The launch of eBook subscription service Oyster has set the proverbial cat among the pigeons in the publishing world. Publishers and authors are frantically trying to work out just what on-demand ...

Robin Good's insight:

From the original article by Mark Mulligan: "Subscriptions are clearly the best product set media companies currently have for monetizing the consumption era.

For the music industry they continue to raise as many questions as they answer, but for books they might just be the ticket to genuine digital prosperity."

Here's a few reasons why:

Book Subscriptions Offer a Much Clearer Path to Additive Revenue than Music - because books take longer to read than a CD does to listen, authors and publishers should see greater revenue margins.

Per-reader value versus per-title value - If an author or publisher is simply think in terms of 1 sale becoming 1 rental then it is a net-loss scenario. But if just over twice as many people read the book then it is a net-gain scenario. The more people that subscribe and the more that read more books – theConsumption Quotient -the more likely that subscriptions will become additive rather than substitutive.

The author also suggests that the book industry has a key advantage in that it can learn a lot from the mistakes already done by the music subscription industry and can avoid repeating them by paying attention to a few key elements such as:

Rodrick: print books are here to stay for quite some time still, as there will be, like in your case, always some demand for this unique medium. Print publishers will have to reorganize and rethink their business strategy to remain profitable.

Great find by Robin Good and timely as we just had a session with Rita McGrath (author of the End of Competitive Advantage) emphasizing the impact of disruption and the need for a different mindset around resilience. This preso by Jeremiah Owyang gives some great tips for thinking about the types of shifts in business models we should be thinking about.

5. People make and share - collaboration and co-creation with your customers

6. Empowered people

This is important for CPAs to understand as they advise and support their businesses (clients and employers). Business models are no longer stagnant or as Rita would say, sustainable over a long-term. Thus we need to be constantly re-examiming our competitive advantages.

The U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than $40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade — over half of that in the last four years alone — and Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in.

Robin Good's insight:

From the original article by Mathew Ingram on Paidcontent.org: "...ad revenue falling off a cliff about a decade ago, hitting a brief plateau in the mid-2000s and then free-falling over the next several years.

...The speed with which billions of dollars in advertising revenue simply evaporated over the past decade is incredible.

...Of course, all of that advertising revenue didn’t simply disappear overnight. So where did it go if it wasn’t going to newspapers? It went online, naturally — and the second chart shows the biggest beneficiary of that exodus: namely, Google."

People are always looking to place fault. Things change when something better comes along. Just because newspapers were first doesn't mean they are best. Tobacco knows time is limited, that would explain why they bought Kraft Foods!

"In the old, narrow view of capitalism, business contributes to society by making a profit, which supports employment, wages, purchases, investments, and taxes.

Conducting business as usual is sufficient social benefit. A firm is largely a self-contained entity, and social or community issues fall outside its proper scope.

...

[But] in recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems.

Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.

Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history.

This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle.

A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has emerged over the past few decades.

They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success.

...

The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.

Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress.

Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.

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